french zoo. do you remember at the top of the show, i said we were trying to fit a ten pound show into a five pound bag. the french zoo didn't fit into the bag. but if you come back tomorrow, i swear i will tell you and it is totally worth waiting for. doing this five years, still what did you have for dinner tonight? the president had a green salad, steak, sautéed vegetables and 12 republicans. >> we've got to get smarter about our priorities as a nation. >> the president's budget is public. >> unveiling his long awaited fiscal blueprint. >> fiscally responsible blueprint. >> the president's budget blueprint. >> grow the economy and shrink the deficit. >> it represents compromise. >> common sense and compromise. >> offered a big compromise to the republicans.

>> he does deserve some credit. >> there are some things in the budget we can find some agreement on. >> can there be a deal? >> no, no, no, no, that's not what i said. >> the sequester is the new normal. >> the sequester will stay in place. >> probably a status quo budget. >> paul ryan responded. when does he balance the budget. >> look at me, look how great i am. >> we put up a budget that balances. >> it is disingenuous. >> claims to balance but won't tell you how. >> republicans have done things that haven't been entirely popular. >> paul ryan is last year's news. >> probably a status quo budget. >> paul ryan doesn't have the last word. >> when does he balance the budget. >> paul ryan, fairly insignificant in this debate. >> we said here is how you restructure medicare. we put lots of things in there. we represent seniors as well. fiscal cliff wasn't popular i would add. >> insignificant to this debate. >> the american people deserve better than what we have been seeing. >> the budget likely to be a big topic of conversation. >> republicans having dinner at the white house. >> having a dinner date.

>> dining with a dozen republican senators. >> can there be a deal? >> i already met republicans more than halfway. >> in other words, bargain or bust. >> that's the bottom line. >> there's the right time cue. barack obama is a fairly modern man with a very old fashioned idea. now what if i invite them to dinner. that's his idea. what if we sit down socially in a very relaxed way, talk business, the business of governing the united states of america. that sort of thing used to actually work wonders in washington. i'm going to tell you the absolutely fascinating story later in it program, fascinating to me anyway, about how the most important social program in america became the law of the land, thanks to a chance conversation at a washington tea party back when they had tea

parties. a tea party in a supreme court justice's home. there used to be a social circuit in washington, regular dinner parties. if you go back far enough, afternoon tea parties, where democrats and republicans routinely ran into each other, became more friendly, earned each other's trust, found common ground, room to compromise, got things done. president obama on his own is trying to recreate that world one dinner at a time. tonight he served dinner at the white house for 12 republican senators who never get to talk to him in private, who never get a feel of what the president is really like, until tonight. in a room in the white house called the old family dining room. around the table, lamar alexander, susan collins of main, make crepe oh, mike endzone ee of wyoming, orrin

hatch, johnny isaacson of georgia, pat roberts of kansas, john thune of south dakota, roger wicker of mississippi, and last and not at all least, marco rubio of florida. it is fair to assume the president made some of the points at dinner that he made in the rose garden this morning announcing his new budget. >> now, on the topic of deficits, despite all the noise in washington, here is a clear and unassailable fact. our deficits are already falling. over the past two years, i signed legislation that will reduce the deficits by more than $2.5 trillion, more than two-thirds of it through spending cuts and the rest through asking the wealthiest americans to be in paying their fair share. doesn't mean we don't have more work to do. here is how we finish the job. my budget will reduce the

deficits by nearly another $2 trillion so that all told, we will have surpassed the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that independent economists believe we need to stabilize our finances. but it does so in a balanced and responsible way, a way that most americans prefer. >> we don't yet know exactly what the republican senators said about the president's budget at dinner tonight, but the republican leader of the house of representatives immediately attacked the president's budget today using the most absurd and childish comparison that you can. you've heard this a thousand times. he compared a family's budget to the federal government's budget. >> the president's budget never comes to balance. every family has to balance its budget, washington should as well. >> that is, of course, not true, unless you don't count the family's mortgage as part of

their budget. financially prudent families usually carry very significant debt, which they can afford in the long term. that debt comes in the form of mortgages, car payments, and loans for education and other needs, but in republican world every american family is limiting spending to only what it takes in in current income, nothing more. if that were the case, home ownership would be virtually nonexistent in this country and we would be driving some very, very old cars. if the president was going to make any progress with republicans at the dinner table tonight, they were going to have to leave all the john boehner baby talk about family budgeting out of that dining room. joining me, ezra klein, msnbc policy analyst, kasie hunt, a political reporter that covered tonight's dinner at the white house.

what do we know, kasie? >> the statements are starting to trickle in from the republicans who were at dinner at the white house. it ended just about 40 minutes ago. our first statement came from senator johnny isaacson of georgia who was the organizer of the dinner. he says that our dinner with president obama tonight was very productive. we discussed the debt, deficits and fiscal challenges facing our country, sitting down to talk about how to get our arms around debt is a good step forward to what i hope will be an on-going discussion and path forward to solving our nation's problems. senator hatch took a similar positive tone. said they had a wide ranging open discussion on a range of subjects from tax reforms to entitlements. >> kasie, any indication they got into things other than

budget issues? i know the agenda was budget issues, but with gun legislation coming up in the senate, any hints that they talked about that? >> i haven't gotten wind of that from my sources on capitol hill yet. i will say at the last dinner, they were pretty careful to avoid that. at that one they touched on immigration which has a much deeper bipartisan consensus and is less divisive emotionally, if you will. i would say i would be surprised to hear they got into that at any great length. >> ezra klein, if you can imagine them getting off their talking points in the dining room and i can, when they close the door and it is really that kind of meeting, it's definitely possible, where do you think they would find the biggest area to find some sort of common ground? >> there's actually a fair amount of common ground. the problem is whether or not the common ground extends to politics. so a couple of not even a year ago, mitch mcconnell went to "the wall street journal" and said that in order to consider more revenues, he would need three things.

he would need to see means testing in medicare, which means higher income folks pay more or get less, would need the retirement age to go up, see a chained cpi, cost of living increase and social security. the president's budget has two of the three, in addition it replaces sequester, protects defense spending from the sequester. there's a lot for republicans to like. the degree of policy difference if you go back as we were saying six months ago, year ago, two years ago, the honest problem is that as the president moves on this stuff, so, too, do the republicans, now the idea from boehner and mcconnell, nothing that includes any revenues at all is in the remote realm of acceptable. the question is whether the political incentives that make it difficult for republicans to come to agreement with the president, at least at this point, will abate at all. even if they'll abate in that room. 12 senators is a lot of folks who could be leaking what was

going on in a meeting like that. >> kasie hunt, the president is taking a lot of heat from some democrats about putting chained cpi as a possibility within a larger agreement that would include revenues. is there any word from the white house that they may start to contemplate having dinners with democratic members of congress to keep them from going too far on that issue and keep the discussion going? >> there are some democrats who have expressed an interest in having -- hearing more from the white house on that. but you have to remember, obama is thinking about his legacy at this point and these issues are always difficult no matter what side of the aisle you're on. saw the top house campaigner come out and say this chain cpi idea isn't something he could support and he was attacked by the club for growth, right wing anti-tax organization for coming out and saying that. you're seeing a lot of cross currents cutting on this issue. remember mitt romney aggressively went after

president obama for cutting $716 billion out of medicare to pay for parts of the health care overhaul. >> ezra, i made the point many times on this program that there is no agreement until everything is agreed to, and gene sperling was trying to make that point today about cpi issues. let's listen to that. >> the offer that is there for speaker boehner is not an a la cart menu, you can't decide to pick out only the concessions the president has made and not include the concessions from the republican side that need to be part of a bipartisan deal that could pass both houses. >> ezra, that's what makes this all so difficult. the idea that people are starting to doubt whether the president is risking anything with this proposal because if they can't agree to everything, nothing will happen, therefore none of it is real. >> i think the white house is looking and i think they're hitting bedrock here.

over the last couple months, maybe a year, there has been two main arguments from the republican side why a deal hasn't been cut and that it is the white house's fault. one, the president doesn't reach out to the hill, talk to republicans, doesn't know them, know what they want, not doing the work of a legislative leader. and two, that he won't cut entitlements, you get leaks out of back door meetings, but when it comes down to it, you pulls it back, increases the taxes you need. they knocked both excuses off the table. they either get a deal or if they don't, the fact it is republican in trans-i jent, it is more clear. >> thank you both for joining me. coming up, michelle obama in her own moving words on gun safety. and a united states senator emotionally struggling to find the words to express what it has meant to him to have the families from sandy hook elementary school in washington this week pushing for gun

safety. in the "rewrite" tonight, who was the most important cabinet member in history? i will suggest someone many of you may never have heard of, but she did more to change the way we live in this country than any other cabinet member. and later, anthony weiner now seems to think if mark sanford can do it, he can do it. anthony weiner is back. asional have constipation,

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last week, former congressman asa hutchinson released his report paid for by the nra who paid him an undisclosed sum, an answer i tried to get out of him on this show. his report about school safety according to the nra. it was a completely nonpolitical report, nothing political about it. he then tried to defend that report on this program. you can judge how successful he did that. then today he announced his

candidacy for governor of arkansas. the author of that completely nonpolitical report that the nra put out last week. coming up next, how the families from sandy hook have helped achieve a compromise on gun safety in the united states senate. flying is old hat for business travelers.

the act of soaring across an ocean in a three-hundred-ton rocket doesn't raise as much as an eyebrow for these veterans of the sky. however, seeing this little beauty over international waters is enough to bring a traveler to tears. we're putting the wonder back into air travel, one innovation at a time. the new american is arriving. what impact did these families specifically, their presence this week, have on your breakthrough? >> i'm a parent, i'm a grandparent. it's this, i'll share.

i can't imagine. i can do something. i can do something. >> that was west virginia democratic senator joe manchin trying to answer the question of what the presence of the families from newtown, connecticut in washington this week has meant to his efforts to craft a compromise with republicans on gun safety legislation. today, manchin and republican senator pat toomey announced a bill that would expand the

background system to cover all commercial gun sales, included those conducted at gun shows and online. today, president obama released this statement. this is not my bill and there are aspects of the agreement that i might prefer to be stronger, but the agreement does represent welcome and significant bipartisan progress. the first procedural vote on gun control legislation is scheduled for tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. on the senate floor. a group of republican senators continues to threaten to oppose the motion to proceed on any gun legislation. they intend to mount a filibuster that according to their public rationale is based entirely on a lie. here is how senator ted cruz tells that lie. >> for any legislation that is potentially infringing the bill of rights, taking away our constitutional protections, i think it should be a 60 vote threshold. >> it is well established in law and supreme court precedent that there is nothing being

contemplated in the united states senate that infringes on the constitutional right to bear arms. that right has never been interpreted by the court to be a right to bear any and all firearms that exist in the world. you do not have a right to bear a machine gun in this country. ted cruz hasn't yet introduced a bill in the senate to give you the right to bear a machine gun because he knows that congress is well within its constitutional prerogatives when it chose to ban the sale and manufacture of machine guns and certain other kinds of firearms. if ted cruz and rand paul and the other constitutional scholars and senate servants of the nra could point to one supreme court case indicating there is anything unconstitutional about the legislation coming to the senate, they would do that. instead, they simply choose to lie about the second amendment and cravenly do the bidding of

the nra, doing the bid of merchants of death that reep profits of the industry that guarantees america's mass murderers are the best equipped mass murderers in the world. krystal ball, people are wondering what is it that's coming, is it a stunt for the media. i think we saw the kind of import they have. >> that's absolutely right. could you have more powerful spokespeople, and these are not politicians, these are not activists, these are people whose lives have been changed and who think that they can take that and use it to make a change in the country for the better. i don't know how you cannot be impacted by that. when you look at the full array of forces that are pushing for change, you have gabrielle giffords and mark kelly, joe biden that speaks to that

personally, and the president himself, not just paying lip service but really getting into the debate, giving it everything he has, and now the first lady as well. it's quite an array of powerful forces there. >> richard wolf, joe manchin, as conservative a democrat as we have in the senate, from a state where talking anything about gun legislation is very politically dangerous, there he is going out there, trying to find a compromise. >> let's remember, this is a guy in the last election took a shotgun to a piece of legislation and fired the shotgun as part of his ad. >> the kind of thing that works well in west virginia. >> let's make a contrast to joe manchin, pat toomey. they deserve credit for coming to the compromise. there was 94% support for the position he is taking. west virginia, not the same kind of politics.

i think the emotion is genuine. there are a lot of smart people in washington that said the emotion will fade. the power of sandy hook will go, no one will care. they still care. that's something to be relatively proud of, even though it could and should have been stronger. >> the president had more in his statement. said the senate must overcome obstruction by defeating a threat and filibuster and allowing a vote on this and other common sensory forms to protect our kids. any bill still has to clear the house. i ask the american people to stand up, raise their voices, these measures deserve a vote. there's the president saying if you think i've been working hard on this so far, i'm going to continue to push it even after the senate vote. >> and the families, newtown families have said we're not going anywhere, we're in this for the long term. on one hand, john boehner who has been cagey on what he is going to do in the house, you might think you could slow walk this issue, it would sort of go away, the public would move on.

i think we have seen at this point the public is not going to move on. this is still an issue that people care about, still enjoys over 90% approval, still has powerful forces behind it, and such an emotional desire in the country to see a change. >> john boehner is never afraid to say the president's ideas are dead in the house of representatives. he will not say that. he is saying we will look at whatever the senate passes. >> that's important. it is also important to look what the nra said about this compromise today, and their position was, well, the president doesn't like it, so it is kind of okay, even though we think it has no effect. if they need the foil of the president to say he's unhappy so it is okay, so be it. they all need to look like they're doing something, maybe not the nra but john boehner. >> thank you both for joining me. coming up, the first lady makes gun safety personal with an extraordinary speech about a young girl who lost her life because of gun violence in the old neighborhood where michelle

obama grew up. in the "rewrite" tonight, a woman i love. a woman i never met but i love. and i'm going to tell you her story. you're going to hear her story in her own words, a truly extraordinary story. you're going to learn a lot. stay with us. ♪

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right now, my husband is fighting as hard as he can,

engaging as many people as he can to pass common sense reforms to protect our children from gun violence. [ applause ] and these reforms deserve a vote in congress. [ applause ] >> in the spotlight tonight, in a rare political move for this first lady, michelle obama took her place in the gun safety debate that is consuming washington. she made her case in very personal and emotional terms, telling the story of a teenage girl who grew up in the same chicago neighborhood as the first lady. now, i had a little more to say about this, but i think what i should do is just get out of the way and let the first lady have her say. >> we all know her story. she was 15 years old, an honor student at king college prep.

and she came from a good family, two devoted parents, plenty of cousins, solid godparents, grandparents, an adoring little brother. they are hard working people, church going folks. she did everything she could for her daughter, had her in every activity she could, anything to keep her off the streets and keep her busy. and as i visited with the pendleton family at the funeral, i couldn't get over how familiar they felt to me because what i realized is her family was just like my family. hidea was me and i was her. but i got to grow up and go to princeton and harvard law school and have a career and a family

and the most blessed life i could ever imagine. and hidea, oh, we know that story. just a week after she performed at my husband's inauguration, she went to a park with some friends and got shot in the back because some kid thought she was in a gang. hidea's family did everything right, but she still didn't have a chance. see, at the end of the day, this is the point i want to make, that resources matter. they matter. that what it takes to build strong, successful young people isn't genetics or pedigree or good luck, it is opportunity. and i know from my own experience i started out with

exactly the same aptitude, exactly the same intellectual, emotional capabilities as so many of my peers. and the only thing that separated me from them was that i had a few more advantages than some of them did. i had adults who pushed me. i had activities that engaged me, schools that prepared me to succeed. i had a community that supported me and a neighborhood where i felt safe. and in the end, that was the difference between growing up and becoming a lawyer, a mother, and first lady of the united states, and being shot dead at the age of 15. are we truly meeting our obligations to our children? it's a question we should also be asking in chicago and in every corner of this country. and it was the question weighing on my heart when i met with her

classmates on the day of her funeral. dozens of them later spoke at the service, each referring to her as my best friend. and let me tell you it is hard to know what to say to a roomful of teenagers who are about to bury their best friend. but i started by telling them that hidea was clearly on her way to doing something truly worthy with her life. i told them that there's a reason we're here on this earth and that each of us has a mission in this world. and i urged them to use their lives to give meaning to hidea's life. i urged them to dream as big as she did and work as hard as she did and live a life that honors every last bit of her god given promise.

so today i want to say the exact same thing to all of you. i want to urge you to come together and do something worthy of her memory and worthy of our children's future. join me and hidea's classmates and young people across this city who by the way even in the face of so much hardship and such long odds are still fighting so hard to succeed. we need to show them not just with words but with action that they are not alone in this struggle. we need to show them that we believe in them and we need to give them everything they need to believe in themselves. i would not be here if it weren't for that kind of belief. and i know that together we can do this. so let me tell you this, i look forward to the work that you do.

i look forward to you hitting this goal and surpassing it. i look forward to this city being the model of what communities can do to wrap their arms around our youth and make them the best they can be, to embrace all of our neighborhoods and every last one of our children. thank you so much. good luck and god bless. [ applause ] your longwear makeup might stay on, ♪

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tonight's "rewrite" is a labor of love, love of a woman i never met, a woman who changed our world. she was born on this very day in 1880. and tonight's "rewrite" will be a love letter to her on her birthday, and that's next. . nice to meet you nia, i'm mike. what do you drive? i have a ford explorer, i love my car. and you're treating it well? yes i am. there are a lot of places you could take your explorer for service, why do you bring it back to the ford dealership? they specifically work on fords. it seems to me like the best care. and it's equal or less money, so it's a value for me. get a free brake inspection and brake pads installed for just 49.95 after rebates when you

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he would be willing to rewrite the formula for cost of living increases for social security benefits. that surely came up at the dinner with senators, republican senators at the white house, and that has earned him the label of first democratic president trying to cut social security, which is not true. president clinton proposed cutting social security benefits for some retirees by taxing those benefits as regular income and democrats in the house and senate voted for that social security benefit cut, including some members of congress who are today outraged by president obama's social security proposal. to be fair to most democrats, it is perfectly reasonable to have been in favor of the clinton proposal and against the obama proposal because they're two very different things, but some well meaning defenders of social security these days talk about it as if social security law is set in stone, as if it is now and always should be unchangeable, with regard to

benefits, many of them are perfectly willing to increase social security taxes. if you haven't spent years studying or working on social security, it is hard to know who to listen to about this stuff. neither the house nor the senate has a recognized expert on the subject any more like the departed democratic senator patrick moynihan and claude pepper, all of the people i desperately want to talk to about this are no longer with us, and the one i would love to talk to the most is the woman who created social security. i know you're thinking hey, wait a minute, franklin roosevelt proposed social security and he was definitely not a woman. but it wasn't really his idea. roosevelt's brilliant idea, and i do mean brilliant, it was also then very brave, was to give us our first woman in a president's cabinet.

there were many jobs people could not imagine a woman doing in those days, and secretary of labor was definitely one of them. how could a woman hold her own with union bosses, not to mention other members of the cabinet. president roosevelt chose a woman named francis perkins as his secretary of labor, the highest ranking woman in american government and did it simply because he thought she was the best possible choice for the job, which she proved more thoroughly than perhaps any cabinet member in history. no member of the cabinet has ever changed life in america more than francis perkins did. 30 years after she was offered her cabinet post in a speech at the social security headquarters in washington she told the story of her appointment this way. >> before i was appointed, i

made a conversation with roosevelt in which i said perhaps he wouldn't want me to be secretary of labor, because if i were, i should want to do this and this and this. among the things i wanted to do was to find a way of getting unemployment insurance, old age insurance and health insurance. i remember he looked somewhat startled. he said well, if you think it can be done, and i said i don't know. he said well, constitutional problems. yes, very severe constitutional problems, but what have we been elected except to solve constitutional problems. lots of other problems have been solved by the people of the united states and there's no reason this one shouldn't be solved. well, if -- he said do you think you can do it. he said i won't ask you to promise anything. he looked at me wisely, all

right, i will authorize you to try and if you succeed, that's fine. well, i said that's all i wanted. i don't want you to put any blocks in my way. >> and there you have the voice of history. there you have a man and woman in the moment of conception of the most important and most successful social program in american history. the man gets all the credit in popular history, but the woman did all the work. social security was her idea. it would never have become law without her. if you want to argue as some of you might that medicare is now more important a program than social security, you should know that medicare is but a subset of social security law. its legislative path was merely amendment to pre-existing social security act. and medicare's constitutionality

was established only on the back of social security's constitutionality, which ultimately became francis perkins' biggest challenge in writing that law. she and her team of lawyers and legislative experts couldn't come up with a constitutional justification for a national government administered pension program. in that same speech you heard, which was given when she was 82 years old, she told the story, the amazing story, of how she personal secured the constitutionality of social security. this for me is the stuff of absolutely delicious washington oral history. it takes place at a social ritual that has now disappeared from our land, not just washington, a tea party, a real tea party. a tea party that happens to be in the home of then supreme court justice harlin stone.

you will hear her misspeak and refer to him as attorney general, when she clearly means supreme court justice. now listen to how this nonlawyer, francis perkins solved the puzzle of the constitutionality of social security. listen! listen to how history is made. >> we were having a great rangle about it, one day went out to tea, in washington you don't go to parties just because you want to go, you go because you have to go. i had to call upon mrs. stone, the attorney general, and she was at home on wednesday afternoons, and about 5:45, nearly the end of the day, i went to her house and presented myself, a lot of people there,

went up to the dining room to get a cup of tea and there i met mr. justice stone who had just come home from the court and was getting his cup of tea, and we greeted each other, sat down to have another chat. he said how are you getting on. i said all right. then i said you know, i am having big trouble, mr. justice, because we don't know in this draft of the economic security act i am working on, we're not quite sure, you know, what will be a wise method of establishing this law. and it's a difficult constitutional problem, you know, and we're guided by this, that and the other case. he looked around, put his hand up, said the taxing power, my dear, the taxing. you can do anything. i didn't question him any further. i knew it wasn't proper for him to tell me, shouldn't say it, but i went back to my committee and never told them how i got my great information.

as far as they know, i went in the wilderness and had a vision. anyway, i came back and said i was firmly for the taxing power. weren't going to get the curious constitutional relationships, the taxing power of the united states, you can do anything under it, said i. so we proved it. some of you don't remember the anxiety with which some of us watched the first case go before the supreme court, but it came down absolutely all right, the opinion written in elaborate, fine social language, not by justice stone, but he voted on the matter and we were safe. this is the reason we go so strongly on the taxing power and that the whole system of taxation is the basis of the social security act. >> and it became the basis of medicare and it became the basis

of president obama's affordable care act. the constitutionality of social security and medicare and the affordable care act are all based on francis perkins' novel use of the power to tax 78 years ago. tomorrow night, i will try to divine what she may have to say about our current social security debate. we will listen to what she had to say about changing social security in her own words. i just wanted to introduce this remarkable woman to you tonight, let the country hear her voice once again because today is her birthday. francis cora lee perkins born to a family in boston on this day in 1880. her family eventually lost its wealth and she became a social worker and community organizer of sorts in new york where she lived on very little money and eventually commanded the attention of new york politicians, including the

governor of new york, then franklin delano roosevelt who was moved by her advocacy for poor people and exploited workers. she was a self made woman, didn't advance her career by marriage, didn't flinch at challenges that everyone else considered impossible. francis perkins changed the world the old fashioned way, with hard work, persistence, and passion. tonight this country owes a happy birthday nod to a uniquely american hero. francis perkins. introducing new febreze stick & refresh with command strips from 3m. designed to stick and eliminate odors anywhere. like this overflowing trashcan. to test it, we brought in the scott family. so what do you smell? beach house and you're looking out over the ocean. some place like, uh, hawaii in like a flower field. take your blindfolds off. aw man! [ screams ] [ laughs ] that smells good. i wouldn't even just put it in the trash, i'd put it in every room.

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it may be no one is rooting for mark sanford to beat democrat elizabeth colbert busch more than anthony weiner that may be watching that race thinking if sanford can do it, what about me? a "the new york times" report says anthony weiner is thinking about running for the job he always wanted, mayor of new york city.

he told the times i don't have this burning overriding desire to go out and run for office. oh, sure he doesn't. it is not the single and medicating force in my life, of course not, as it was for some time. i realize to some degree it is now or never for me, i am trying to gauge not only what's right and feels comfortable right this second, oh, i thought that's the way he used to think, but i am also thinking how will i feel in a year, two years, five years. is this the time that i should be doing this and then there's the other side of the coin which is am i still the same person who i thought would make a good mayor and people are wondering are you the same person with the twitter account that had like a lot of period stuff flying around on it. >> i think anthony weiner's problem has been to some degree as you would say -- >> you were keeping a straight face longer than i was. >> for a second.

i think the problem was not so much the sex. >> i am over here laughing, you talk. >> not so much the sex but the weird factor, and it wasn't a sex scandal so much as a sex chat scandal. people around the country don't love twitter that much, it is confusing, drunk uncle on "saturday night live" talks about how confusing twitter technologies are. you add to that cheating or infidelity or something bumping up to it depending how you define it, there was a weirdness for him. i disagree with the claim it is now or never, he is young, has plenty of time. >> that's the thing you chuckled at. now or never, like why is he thinking that. >> that's the most silly part. i do understand to some element how much they have been through, and a lot of people can see them as human beings. there's no doubt this new magazine article goes into depth and it is painful. you get through reading it, you start out voyeuristic and end up

feeling for them. >> she has been great and supportive for him, loving through this thing, they had a baby in the middle of it as it happens, and i would think that new york city is an electorate that's prepared to keep an eye on the issues and overlook a lot of this thing. >> i think if there's a place you're going to get a hearing, it is in the new york media tabloid market. some of this is a question of how long do you cover the sex crap and in a long new york race, he could definitely get past it. the other interesting part was his wife saying i didn't want him to resign. that's the other part of all of this. it's always more about power than the scandal or sex. senator vitter, the esteemed republican, remains in the senate and people no longer bring up the fact that he was entangled with accusations relating to prostitutes. >> benji brank is dying for him